Visited the fair city of London recently and found the guards at Buckingham Palace wearing uniforms/hats pictured here. I did some Googling and found articles dated Aug/Sept 2008 that talked about a potential hat change, but found no more recent articles that confirmed whether the proposed change ever came to fruition. Is this uniform the new look, or did I miss the memo that it was casual hat day at Buckingham?
Pure speculation, but maybe it has something to do with summer uniform. While it has been decades ago, we went to see the guards (Guards?) in winter and everybody was in greatcoats and bearskins. The Horse Guards were in cloaks. A bearskin hat in June might just be too uncomfortable and heat stroke inducing to tolerate.
I can’t tell you how may different variations of “Buckingham” “palace” “royal” “guard” “hats” “uniform” I’ve plugged in and I’ve not gotten one return that showed anything other than a variation of the bearskin hat uniform or the Life Guards or Blues & Royals or as I mentioned previously, a bunch of articles about a suggested hat change that was published around Aug/Sept 08, and nothing after that.
Honestly I didn’t care much, other than that I know I’ll be asked after I share pictures from our trip, so I wanted to be armed with info (pardon/pun), but now it’s bugging me. I hate not knowing!
Solved. They are the 23 Engineer Regiment. The most recent guard schedule was from March, so I didn’t check it since we were there at the end of May, but in desperation I perused it, found the 23rd listed there, looked them up, and they have the maroon beanie-type hats (forgive me for not knowing the style) with the gold emblem. I didn’t realize different military types were invited to guard Buckingham Palace. Now I know.
You’ll see plenty of bearskins on the Trooping of the Colour this morning.
Looks like a beret in the OP’s linked image.
Bearskins are worn by Her Majesty’s soldiers during the Trooping the Colours ceremony in June every year, so I don’t think “summer uniform” would’ve been the answer, in any event: Trooping the Colour - Wikipedia
Or, what Quartz said.